U.S. officials are undoubtedly raising a glass in celebration of an Iranian plane crash last Sunday that killed all 66 people aboard.

After all, from the standpoint of the proponents of U.S. sanctions against Iran, the crash is a dream-come-true. The deaths of those 66 people, including one child, will, presumably, anger their families, who will then, hopefully, rise up in protest against the Iranian government, which will then bring about the violent ouster of the Iranian regime and its replacement with a pro-U.S. regime.

No one knows for certain what caused the crash, and it might well have been the weather. But another distinct possibility is that the plane crashed because the U.S. sanctions on Iran have long inhibited the ability of Iranian officials to keep their domestic airliners properly maintained.

In fact, in a remarkable admission, the New York Times pointed this out in its story about the plane crash:

Under decades of international sanctions, Iran’s commercial passenger aircraft fleet has aged, with accidents occurring regularly in recent years.

The sanctions have prevented the oil-rich country from updating its fleet, forcing it to use substandard Russian planes and to patch up older jets far past their normal years of service, drawing on spare parts bought on the black market.

In 2014, a locally built Iranian passenger plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Mehrabad Airport, killing 39 people and reviving questions about the safety of an aviation sector hobbled by sanctions.

Make no mistake about it: U.S. officials are fully aware of the airliner problems in Iran that have arisen because of their sanctions. That’s okay with them. In fact, it’s more than okay. The deaths of those people in Iranian plane crashes are, from the standpoint of sanctions promoters and enforcers, fantastic. That’s the point of the sanctions — to kill Iranians so that the rest of the populace gets angry, rises up against their government, and replaces it with a pro-U.S. regime.

Recall when U.S. sanctions on Iraq were killing Iraqi children during the 1990s. When three high UN officials, Hans von Sponek, Jutta Purghart, and Denis Halliday, resigned in protest against what they considered to be U.S.-inflicted genocide against all those children, U.S. sanctions bureaucrats scoffed. In their minds, von Sponek, Purghart, and Halliday, were weak. After all, short of a military invasion, how else could the U.S. government pressure the Iraqi people into ousting Saddam Hussein from power and replacing him with a pro-U.S. dictatorial regime? The more Iraqi children who were being killed over the 11 years of sanctions, the greater the chance of regime change in Iraq.

Of course, as most everyone knows, since the sanctions and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi children had failed to accomplish their intended goal — regime change in Iraq, a U.S. invasion of Iraq (under the guise of searching for WMDs) ultimately became necessary.

It’s no different, of course, with the U.S. sanctions against North Korea. Everyone knows that North Korea is an impoverished Third World country that has a 100 percent socialist economic system, which has brought untold misery to the North Korean populace, including death by starvation of millions of North Koreans.

But that high rate of misery and that high death toll from socialism is not good enough for U.S. officials. They want the suffering and the deaths to get even higher. In that way, the people who are still surviving will (hopefully) rise up, oust the North Korean regime from power, and install a pro-U.S. regime, which will then invite the U.S. government to establish military bases and install missiles on the Korean-China border, much like the regime-change operation that the U.S. government instigated in Ukraine.

The important thing to keep in mind with sanctions is that the populace of the nation that is being targeted are the pawns who can — and, it is believed, should be — sacrificed for the greater good of regime change. That includes the Iranian people who die in plane crashes owing to the inability of airline officials to keep their planes properly maintained because of the U.S. sanctions.

I can just see U.S. sanctions bureaucrats, on learning the news of the most recent Iranian plane crash, declaring to their sanctions colleagues, “Ladies and gentlemen of the U.S. sanctions system against Iran. Please raise your glass in celebration of the most recent Iranian plane crash. Yes, it’s only 66 people, including only 1 child, unlike the hundreds of thousands of children we killed in Iraq with our sanctions against that country. Nonetheless, the death of those 65 adults and 1 child quite possibly bring us closer to achieving our goal of regime change in Iran.”

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.